IPv6 support

We're adding native support for IPv6 to our system. First up, the trackers have got some newly added v6 support. Our name servers are also responding on v6 and the website will soon be available on v6 as well.

All users are encouraged to learn more about IPv6 and to try to use it instead of IPv4. It's especially good for torrent traffic as there will be no issues with port forwarding or NAT!

Also, we would love for the developers of the great torrent clients out there to have a dialog about IPv6 with the team that develops our tracker. It would be really good to cooperate around this!

Posted 01-19 2009 by bkp

47 comments

Well this seems like the best place to ask this as I have found nowhere else to, so how can I use IPv6? I know what it is and all, but is it possible that my ISP doesn't support it? My router almost certainly does, but when I go to wireless properties, it says "IPv6 Local" and "IPv4 Interet". Any clues? I'm running Windows 7 Beta x64 if that helps, and have a WRT600n router. I really want to use this as it is truly the future, but I need this awesome community's help. Thanks!!!

I noticed that Opentracker has some recent commits about IPv6, so I will have to give it a try. The nameservers don't have AAAA records yet on the root servers, but I can get them off of your nameservers. Glad that Transmission (my favorite BT client) recently got IPv6 support. I will have to try getting Opentracker going on my 486 now :-D.

#20: I've noticed the same behavior with Azureus/Vuze. If connecting over ipv6, tracker.thepiratebay.org *does* reply with some data, but there appears to be a problem with it or the client's understanding of it. Azureus fails to connect then falls back to DHT.
The peer list coming from the TPB seems to include a bunch of v6 addresses, so I'm not sure where the misunderstanding is.

Make sure that the "Prefer IPv6 addresses when both ipv6 and ipv4 addresses are available" checkbox is checked in Options&gt;Connection&gt;Advanced Network Settings.
You might need to select "Advanced" in Option&gt;Mode to be able to access this setting.
Don't forget to hit "Save" after setting any option :)

If you are interested in free and zero configuration IPv6 connectivity, check out the Freenet6 service (www.freenet6.net). The Freenet6 service offers both anonymous and authenticated IPv6 connectivity through Hexago's (www.hexago.com) Gateway6 client which is free, open source, available for most OS:s and also part of number of Linux distributions. Also, there is the IPv6 community at go6 (www.go6.net) that is quite responsive when it comes to helping people get going with IPv6.

@36 At the very least (quoting from the original post) "It's especially good for torrent traffic as there will be no issues with port forwarding or NAT!" If you're reading this blog, then I imagine that has some importance for you.

IPv6 is designed, in part, to bring back complete end-to-end connectivity on the internet. If you don't care about that, then you might care about ipv4 addresses running out relatively soon.

If you don't care about *that* then you are welcome to not be involved in the transition until your ISP has to change over -- the internet will be just fine without you.

Please keep in mind: firewall != NAT. You can still be firewalled, allowing end-to-end connections only on certain ports. NAT makes it so that only *one* device behind the NATing box can serve a particular port. So, for instance, you have to forward a different port for every computer using a torrent client. Using ipv6 (in this case that means plentiful public IPs) your devices no longer share an IP, so you get to *allow* ports instead of *forward* them.